


The Rose with the Broken Neck

by warriorpoet



Category: Thelma and Louise (1991)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, Ghosts, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 13:02:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13054548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warriorpoet/pseuds/warriorpoet
Summary: Thelma wakes up, and Louise is gone.





	The Rose with the Broken Neck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HerbertBest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HerbertBest/gifts).



Thelma wakes up with her hand empty, the tight, reassuring pressure of Louise’s hand in hers gone. The sting of her nails digging into her skin, gone. Knowing that the person who mattered most to her through all this, there at the end of it. Gone. All of it. Gone.

Her hand twitches, searching. Maybe Louise is still there somewhere. Maybe Thelma can grab her, hold on, and then just hurry up and die already.

There’s a rattle and a pull. Metal on metal, something cold and hard around her wrist. Her eyes open, thick and bleary, and she tries to sit up, heavy and dull.

 _Aw, shit_.

She’s handcuffed to the railing of a hospital bed, that much she can figure.

“Thelma.”

Something swims into her field of vision, blurry and indistinct. Something that sounds pissed off. Someone. 

She blinks, slowly, her eyelids feel like they’re coated with all the sand in Arizona from the inside. Blurs become shapes, shapes become a face.

“Thelma, what in the _hell_ do you think you were doing?”

 _Aw, fuck_.

The face becomes Darryl, and Thelma closes her eyes and fades back into the black.

**

Thelma was reaching across the back seat for the bag with the money when the Polaroids caught her attention.

One picture of JD and her smiled up from the floorboard, and the thought of that thieving little shit holding on to another version of the same picture along with Louise’s life fucking savings made her teeth grind. She snatched it up and crumpled it quickly, looking around over the sides of the car for somewhere to toss it before she realized that’d be a pretty damn stupid idea. She sighed and flopped back down into the passenger seat, tossing it into the glove compartment with a slam to get the hell away from it. 

Thelma reached back for the second picture she found, her and Louise all made up and put right, about to set out on their adventure. She huffed at it, and held it up for comparison as Louise headed back to the car.

“What’s that?” she asked.

Wordlessly, Thelma flipped the Polaroid around for her to see. Louise gave it a matching huff.

“I think I like you better like you are now,” Thelma said, looking down at the picture again, then back up at Louise’s hair loose around her shoulders, the tinge of sunburn across her cheekbones. “It already feels like this picture is from a million years ago.” 

“Funny how that’ll happen.”

“It’s like I don’t even know who these people are. What was I thinking?”

“We were gonna have fun.” Louise’s voice was as dry as the desert air.

Thelma jumped out of the car and opened the trunk like Louise hadn’t said a word. 

“Thelma, what’re you doing?”

“What was I even thinking bringing all this shit?” She pulled at her bulging suitcases, scattering sundresses and winter coats and rain boots. “If I’d been thinking better about what to take, maybe none of this would’ve happened.”

“Thelma – “

“Who needs all this stuff anyway? What kind of a life is this?” She gathered it up, pile after pile, dumping it on the parched asphalt beside the car.

“What, so you’re just going to leave all that there?”

“Someone can come along and pick through it or sell it or give it to the Goodwill, I don’t need any of it.”

“Thelma, quit it, you’re going to get us noticed.”

“Done. Let’s go.”

She slammed the car door behind her as Louise slid into the drivers’ seat and turned the key. They peeled out, sandals and blouses and tubes of lipstick collapsing in their wake.

Louise was quiet for a few miles before she spoke. “Feel better now?”

Thelma twisted the cap off another little bottle of Wild Turkey. More room for those now.

“Y’know, I kinda do.”

**

The next time she’s awake, there’s a different man with different questions. “Call me Hal,” he says, but Thelma doesn’t have a word to say to him.

“Can you tell me what happened? Start from what you remember, and we can pick up the pieces along the way.”

His eyes are kind, but his mouth is set straight, in a way that makes the kindness look forced. Thelma tries to shrug, pain shooting through her limbs.

“I talked to Louise a few times while you girls were out there. Did she tell you that?”

Thelma tries to lick her lips, her mouth dry. He pushes a cup of water closer to her. She stares at it, the little ripples the movement makes in the water. 

“I’m sorry for your loss. You two were close?”

“I don’t…” Thelma croaks. She clears her throat and tries again, her voice as strong as she can make it. “I don’t really have anything I can say right now. All this pain medicine they’ve got me on, I could hardly even tell you my own name – “

“I know it was your gun, Thelma. But that doesn’t mean you pulled the trigger.”

She falls silent again.

“Nobody saw anything, nobody knows exactly what happened except you, Louise, and that dead man in a parking lot. And, maybe the bright side here is, Louise doesn’t get a chance to tell her side of things anymore.” He shuffles some papers in the file in front of him. “There isn’t much that can be done about the armed robbery charge – you’re on tape there. But that isn’t my jurisdiction. I’m interested in what happened to you girls in Arkansas.”

Thelma blinked. “Are you telling me to say that Louise is a murderer?”

“I’m not telling you to say anything. I’m just asking for your side of the story. And reminding you that you’re the only person who has a story to tell here.”

He sits back in his chair and sweeps his eyes across Thelma in her hospital bed. She twists the sheet in her free hand, white knuckles and broken fingernails. The handcuffs rattle.

“Louise was your friend. Wouldn’t she want you to do whatever you could to spend less time in prison than you’re already going to?”

Thelma looks down into the cup of water, the surface still. 

“I’m sorry, but I’m real tired. I don’t think I can talk to you anymore today.”

The straight line of his mouth moves, almost like half a smile. “Okay, Mrs. Dickinson. I’ll talk with your doctors and see if I can arrange to see you again tomorrow. Maybe you’ll be up to it then.” His chair scrapes loud, hard plastic on linoleum as he pushes it back. “Just so you know, we’re gonna be taking you back to Arkansas as soon as they clear you out of here. Things are going to go a lot easier for you if you can get your story straight before then. There’s a hell of a lot of difference between a murder charge and an accessory charge.”

Thelma touches her face, the gauze on her cheek damp. She didn’t even realise she’d been crying. 

“I think if you come back, Detective, that I wanna talk to a lawyer.”

She flinches when the door bangs shut behind him.

**

“Is there anything you ever wanted to do but couldn’t? Something where you never did it, but now you think you could?”

Thelma hadn’t really known the question was in her head until it popped out of her mouth.

Louise turned to her from the passenger seat. “How d’you mean?”

“I mean, y’know, if we’re leaving our whole lives behind, you might as well go all in, right? Be the person you always stopped yourself from being.”

“Who would you be?” 

Thelma thought for a second. “I think I’d be an artist.”

Louise laughed, her voice snatched away by the wind as they flew down the highway. “You never drew a thing in your goddamn life, Thelma.”

“Well, there’s a lot of things I’ve never done until now. I could learn. I’m a fast learner. I’ve learned that.”

Louise made an affirmative sound. Thelma glanced over, trying to watch the road and watch Louise think at the same time.

“I guess maybe I spent too much time trying to control things all around. Me, my life. Everything. It doesn’t work. It was a lot of time wasted, maybe.”

“You’re on a good start to not doing that anymore,” Thelma said. “I meant it, before. I like you like this. I liked you before, too, with your starched shirts and your hairspray and always being on time, but I like this more.”

“Really?” Louise seemed to realize that Thelma was staring at her, and snapped an afterthought. “Thelma, watch the road.”

“See, there you go. Controlling everything.” Thelma turned her attention back. “I’d draw you, when I was learning. When we get to Mexico, I’m gonna draw you laying on a beach somewhere with your hair like that, looking like for once you’re just making yourself happy. You’ll be beautiful. That’s how I’ll learn to be an artist.”

She glanced back over just in time to catch Louise smiling, then turning away to hide her smile. Thelma went back to paying attention to her driving, and was caught off guard when Louise leaned over and cupped Thelma’s cheek in her hand and kissed her, gently, at the corner of her mouth.

“I’ll only be as beautiful as you make me,” Louise said.

Thelma sucked on her bottom lip, mouth filled with the taste of Louise’s plain chapstick and the heat of her skin.

**

Some Arizona public defender whose name Thelma has already forgot sits in the corner as Detective Slocumb pulls a little table over Thelma’s bed and sets down all his files.

“Now, Thelma, I’m willing to admit that maybe I made a mistake here and tried to push you too quickly. Maybe we need to start somewhere smaller first.”

He looks to Thelma for a response, but Thelma stays quiet.

“Alright. So how did you and Louise meet?”

It seems like an innocent enough question. She can’t incriminate herself with that, right? Thelma glances over at the lawyer in the corner, but he’s got a newspaper spread open across his lap and looks like no help at all. She clears her throat. It does nothing but make her ribs hurt.

Slocumb puts something on the table in front of her. It takes a second to recognise it, crumpled and smudged with dirt as it is. The Polaroid of her and Louise, put together and set right.

The bruised flesh of her heart throbs with the pressure. 

“You were close,” Slocumb says, not a question.

“Yeah,” Thelma whispers.

“When did you meet her?”

“I guess it was three or four years ago, somewhere like that. I tried throwing a dinner party, and she’d been sort of seeing this guy Darryl worked with for a couple months. The whole thing was stupid, we ended up hiding in the kitchen and talking. We just… hit it off.”

“You were friends ever since?”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“She would have done anything for you?”

Thelma chokes on the lump in her throat. She’s already said too much. She looks over at the lawyer again and her breath freezes when she sees Louise standing by him, shaking her head, a finger to her lips. Thelma closes her eyes and starts to breathe, and when she looks, Louise is gone again.

“Maybe this should wait until I’m back in Arkansas. Till I’ve got whatever lawyer I’m gonna have for the trial. One who might give a shit if he knows he’s gonna get paid.”

Slocumb follows her gaze to the lawyer in the corner, who suddenly looks up from his paper to address the silence. Slocumb sighs heavily. 

“Remember what I told you, Thelma? About what we’re going to have to charge you with unless you can tell us – “

“Yeah. I remember.”

Thelma’s still looking in the corner, but all she sees is empty space.

**

They pulled the car off the highway in the dead of night and twined themselves together in the back seat like they were clumsy teenagers breaking curfew.

“How much time do we have?” Thelma whispered.

“A little,” Louise answered.

Thelma bared her breasts to the moon and Louise mouth was on her, skin hot like all the sunlight from the day was seeping out of her and spreading warmth over Thelma, then inside her as Louise’s hand slipped inside her jeans and touched her gently.

They were gone before the moon had moved too far in the sky. They kept going.

**

It takes weeks, maybe a month, she doesn’t know, doesn’t care, but when Thelma is declared “well enough” she’s driven back to Arkansas in the back of a police van. Her legs are still in casts, so she can’t run. She wouldn’t call that “well enough”, but Slocumb seems fine with it.

“Why couldn’t you take me back on a plane?” she asks, the first thing she’s said to him in days. 

“I thought you’d like being back out on the road. One last time, for old time’s sake.”

He’s losing patience with her, she can tell.

She’s long past giving a damn.

There are bars on the only window she can see out of, and she can kind of peek through the metal grate that separates her from Slocumb in the drivers’ seat. From there she can see the road, miles eaten up by the car, headlights casting shadows on the red rocks, buttes and bluffs. Thelma wants to ask him if he’s going to go through Texas – she thinks she should avoid it out of loyalty to Louise – but she doesn’t want to talk to him. After him saying she should blame it all on Louise, then fuck him. She’s not going to tell him shit.

It was all her own damn fault anyway, she tells herself, dark clouds rolling across her heart and her mind. Her best friend killed a man for her. She got her best friend’s life savings stolen, her lifeline for getting out of trouble.

She told her best friend (or whatever they’d become to each other, no chance to find out, no beach in Mexico to disappear to) to keep going, to drive them to their deaths.

It’s punishment, Thelma figures, that she didn’t die. God, or the universe, or whatever. Thelma fucked up her own life by never really doing what she wanted. Then she tried to, and fucked up Louise’s life. 

The scars on her face catch the tears as she rests her head on the metal grate. Her eyes drift closed, and she can imagine, maybe, just for a second, that she’s falling asleep in the passenger seat, beside Louise. Tangled up in the back seat, maybe, those fleeting moments before the cold starts to seep in.

Jail won’t be so bad, as long as she can remember that feeling.

From there, safe, somewhere between awake and asleep she hears the voice as clear as right beside her.

 _Thelma, hold on_.

There’s a flash, headlights and all she can see is metallic blue green stark against red rocks. Awake, suddenly, Slocumb is shouting and there’s a shriek of metal and breaking glass.

She fades into black.

**

There’s a hand touching her face, and now her face is dry, her skin smooth again, lighter somehow.

There’s the beating of chopper blades above, the car below. Louise’s hand has fallen out of hers, but she’s close, so close.

“I had a dream,” she says. Thinks. “Something like a dream.”

“What happened?” Louise’s voice is beside her, inside her head, echoing through the canyon.

“I was alive, and you were dead. Did you die first? Is that what happened.”

“I don’t remember.” Louise shrugs, and her hand twines in Thelma’s, slips between her fingers, through them, inside her again. “Better late than never, I guess.”

“What happened?” Thelma asks. She’s not quite sure if she means just now, or that moment Louise pulled the trigger, or every second of her life just gone.

“We didn’t make it to Mexico, but this is close enough.”

Thelma takes it in, bluffs and buttes and broken glass, a splash of red, a touch of seafoam green, the line of lit up cop cars with nowhere to go. She watches Slocumb bend down near the mouth of the canyon and pick something up. Crumpled and smudged, the Polaroid picture of her and Louise, put right, breathing but not quite alive. 

“We’ve seen worse places,” Thelma finally decides.

“Ain’t that the truth, sweetheart.”

And in five or ten or twenty years from this moment, candles and cards and dying flowers will rest at the lip of the canyon, offerings for two women whose stories have never really been told, but people have heard just enough to make it interesting. People will talk about seeing the flash of a blue green Thunderbird in the corner of their eye on lonely desert roads, of bad things happening to any man who dares mess with a woman alone in these parts. 

Just stories, silly ghost stories, road-sick truckers on too much speed. 

But they'll be there, and just as fast they'll be gone. Wherever, whenever they want.

For now, though, Thelma holds Louise’s hand, and they wait to be left alone again.


End file.
